Wednesday, February 25, 2009

What do you have a fear of?

In a new book entitled "Click", the author Bill Tancer explores how analysing what people search for can give us a better understanding of what people really think about a particular topic. Using Hitwise, the author took a look at what people have a fear of, by exploring searched for keywords that contained the words "Fear of" in them.

Search results form all the major UK search engines were used over a period of 12 weeks ending on the 14th of February 2009. Some of the finding were quite surprising:

During this period, there were over 8,500 distinct terms containing the phrase ‘fear of’.

The most searched for fear was ‘fear of flying’

Fear of Cats? The most feared animal it seems is cats at number 2 on the list. As there are no films, bands or books that I can find that have this title, it does seem that lots of people really do seem to have an irrational fear of cats!

Top 10 Fear of Searches:

1. fear of flying (2.27% of all ‘fear of’ searches)2. fear of cats (1.72%)3. irrational fear of cats (1.34%)4. fear of clowns (1.10%)5. fear of long words (1.01%)6. fear of heights (0.86%)7. fear of the dark (0.62%)8. fear of death (0.61%)9. fear of spiders (0.43%)10. fear of crime (0.36%)